MIDI question: CC1 and control surface

digitalkettle

This could be a dumb question: I'm a bit lightweight on MIDI...

I've got an Akai MPK Mini mkii controller
It's got a two-axis joystick: left/right for pitch, up/down for mod
It's assigned as a control surface in Ableton Live

If I control a VST synth, such as Air Hybrid 3 (which came with the controller), everything seems to work as expected.
If I control an Ableton instrument, most patches seem to be expecting CC1 to be controlled by the first 'assignable knob'...so CC1 is changed by assignable knob #1 and the mod wheel...not always ideal as the joystick springs back to its center position. Also, CC1 is usually controlling a filter...so no actual wibble effect ;-/

Is there a way around this so I can have natural mod wheel function on the Ableton instruments?

WiresDreamDisasters

Doesn't Ableton have a CC remapper utility you can put before the instrument? That would be the way I'd solve it.

digitalkettle

WiresDreamDisasters said:

Doesn't Ableton have a CC remapper utility you can put before the instrument? That would be the way I'd solve it.

Not out of the box but I think there’s some M4L tools I could try.

Would it fix my issue though? The problem is CC1 coming from knob #1 and the mod wheel...for the Ableton instrument they both control macro #1 (usually a filter) and I’m getting no modulation (the instrument obviously needs to support modulation...but that should be a given, right?).

p.s. I probably don’t know what I’m talking about.

digitalkettle

I dropped a MIDI monitor on the track and saw that, when the keyboard was used as a control surface, CC1 wasn't actually reaching the track so it must be being redirected to parameter control by the script.

Decided to use the keyboard as a simple MIDI controller (I'm already using an APC40 as a control surface) and all was well again (you can see CC1 hitting the track when I touch the mod wheel). The only thing I lose are the 8 control knobs on the keyboard but they were duplicates of the APC40's control knobs...and I can still assign them manually easily enough.